… collectively crafted over coffee in an effort to spread discomfort …

At the Movies

Before fighting the mafia you have to examine your conscience and only after having defeated the mafia within yourself can you fight the mafia within your circle of friends. We and our bad behavior are the mafia.

Maybe an honest world will never exist. But what’s to stop us from dreaming?

Midnight in Paris

I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face … it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds. Until it returns as it does to all men.

We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artists job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

After Life

Eliot Deacon: It’s only a hole in the ground. It’s for…
Jack: …Miss Taylor.
Eliot Deacon: Exactly. For Anna. She belongs here.
Jack: Because she’s dead?
Eliot Deacon: No, because there’s no life left in her.

Anna Taylor: No, please, I don’t want…
Eliot Deacon: You’re a corpse, Anna. Your opinion doesn’t count anymore.
Anna Taylor: But I’m breathing. I must still be alive.
Eliot Deacon: Oh, you people! You think because you breathe, piss, shit you’re alive? You clutch onto life as if your life was worth clutching onto. Was your life worth clutching onto, Anna? Was it? Maybe you died a long time ago.

Eliot Deacon: I thought you were different. You all say you’re scared of death, but the truth is you’re more scared of life.

Shadowland

Isn’t God supposed to be good? Isn’t he supposed to love us? And does God want us to suffer? What if the answer to that question is yes. You see I’m not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to be able to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up. I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he makes us the gift of suffering. Or to put it another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Experience is a brutal teacher. But you learn. My god you learn.

Jack: We read to know we’re not alone. Do you think that is so?
Student: Well I hadn’t thought of it before like that Sir
Jack: No nor did I. I suppose some people would say we love to know we’re not alone. Would you?
Student: Well if you mean falling in love, well I haven’t really. I mean, I probably know more about love from books than from personal experience
Jack: Go on. I’m listening.
Student: Well. I don’t think any of us want to be alone.
Jack: Why love if losing hurts so much. I have no answers any more. Only the life I’ve lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice. As a boy, and as a man. The boy chose safety. The man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.

The Wire (TV – HBO)

You want it to be one way, but its the other way – Marlo Stanfield

Lawyer: You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You are stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off…
Omar: Just like you, man.
Lawyer: …the culture of drugs. Excuse me? What?
Omar: I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?

Omar: Man, money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.

Bubbles: Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief… as long as you make room for other things too.

Bodie: He’s a cold motherfucker.
Poot: It’s a cold world, Bodie.
Bodie: Thought you said it was getting warmer, man.
Poot: World going one way, people another.

Bodie: I feel old. I been out there since I was 13. I ain’t never fucked up a count, never stole off a package, never did some shit that I wasn’t told to do. I been straight up. But what come back? Hmm? You’d think if I get jammed up on some shit they’d be like, “A’ight, yeah. Bodie been there. Bodie hang tough. We got his pay lawyer. We got a bail. They want me to stand with them, right? But where the fuck they at when they supposed to be standing by us? I mean, when shit goes bad and there’s hell to pay, where they at? This game is rigged, man. We like them little bitches on a chessboard.

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell. – Writer/Producer David Simon